Ten years ago, in video games, we were playing the original Guitar Hero, F.E.A.R., KOTOR 2, The Matrix Online, Doom 3, Psychonauts, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, World of Warcraft, The Sims 2, Roller Coaster Tycoon 3, Call of Duty 2, Serious Sam II, Lego Star Wars, and Guild Wars. The GameCube still had games coming out for it, including Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, and graphics were starting to look better. The original Guild Wars looked really nice and WoW was top of the pile in the graphics department.

Games like Psychonauts look dated today, but back then they were true winners, in the area of the Playstation 2, dreaming of what crazy graphics the Playstation 3 could produce. The original Star Wars: Battlefront II was out back then. Graphics cards back then were the Radeon X700 series and Geforce 6600 were some of the top of the line models back then. 128 to 256mb, 400ish mhz core, 11.2 GB/s bandwidth, compared to today’s 4gb, 1ghz core, 500~1000 GB/s, not to mention processors, memory, etc.

Needless to say, things are very much different than what they were and moving into the future, these stats are going to keep growing, but I’d like to easily make the argument that we might not see personal computers or gaming rigs 10 years from now in 2025. Likely, having all of these components at home isn’t going to be a thing anymore. As it is, now, most of what we do is online and I feel like ten years from now, we’ll see most of our heavy PC lifting done outside of our homes while games will be much more accessible to the variety of ways our computers are mobile these days.

For instance, most everything I do, including writing this article, is contained within my web browser. The actual only activity that isn’t done inside of my web browser is graphics manipulation and gaming. Personal computers for the home have drastically reduced themselves over the years, with laptops being the primary tool most people use. The reasoning for this is far beyond the scoop of this article, but my personal belief is that for most families, its better if everyone has their own computer than it is to have to share one, and even then, the shared one probably isn’t a gaming rig.

Which interestingly enough, the most popular games out there are rather low-end, with League of Legends, DOTA 2, and Heroes of the Storm being pretty much some of the most talked about games in the year. They can run easily on most modern laptops, and, showcase to me the growing lack of dependence on the modern PC.

The modern PC is required to make PC gaming a thing and that’s not to say PC gaming is dying, but, in acknowledgement of its accessibility, I argue that ten years from now we’ll likely offload most of the processing power into the cloud. We’ll likely use a GPU/CPU combo that we have today, probably on smaller motherboards, with most of the emphasis on the RAM and networking.

I don’t have any basis for my claims, outside of the fact with faster, more stable broadband and the fact that anything purely CPU based is mostly likely in the cloud as is, it’s not long before we start offloading our GPUs into the cloud, effectively making the job easier – who knows, we’ll likely pay for the amount of processing we do or whatever, this is all theoretical.

As for games themselves, I have no clue where we’re going. With stunning titles like Witcher III coming out this year and the Call of Duty / Battlefield games becoming more and more realistic, we’ll likely look back at 2015 as a time where we were limited by our GPUs and considering the total accessible computer power to be merely laughable.

That, or we could see consoles completely dominate the PC market and Steam Machines are the last vestige of PC gaming. Either or! I feel like the cloud will be the future of PC gaming, but it’s far too early to say.

Next week Elite: Dangerous Horizons launches and I’ll be focused a lot on that, so look forward to my ED: Horizons coverage.


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Last Updated: Mar 14, 2016

About The Author

Get in the bush with David "Xerin" Piner as he leverages his spectacular insanity to ask the serious questions such as is Master Yi and Illidan the same person? What's for dinner? What are ways to elevate your gaming experience? David's column, Respawn, is updated near daily with some of the coolest things you'll read online, while David tackles ways to improve the game experience across the board with various hype guides to cool games.

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